A tsunami is a series of long waves in a body of water, which can flood adjacent and distant coastlines with potentially devastating consequences for the inundated communities. For instance, the 2004 Sumatra tsunami resulted in more than 235,000 deaths and displaced 1.7 million people across 16 countries. Similarly, the Tohoku tsunami that struck Japan on Mar. 11, 2011 is reported to have caused 15,853 casualties, resulted in 3,452 people being declared missing, 6,023 people injured, and over 220 billion dollars in damage.
Tsunami warning systems are crucial to reducing human casualties caused by the tsunamis. These warning systems strive to provide a notification of tsunami danger far enough in advance to allow precautionary steps, including the evacuation of the populace from the affected areas, to be taken. Such systems are on the receiving end of a chain of tsunami reaction activities that begin with the kinds of data that are associated with an event that could trigger a tsunami, such as an underwater or coastal seismic event or other oceanographic disturbances.
In the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has the primary responsibility over forecasting and monitoring the occurrence of tsunamis. NOAA operates a fleet of oceanographic buoys, known as Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART®) stations, and receives seismic data collected by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and other agencies. NOAA analyzes the data to forecast the occurrence of a tsunami continually updates such forecast as more data becomes available. State-level centers are notified by NOAA if a tsunami threat is deemed likely to occur. Relevant civil authorities review the tsunami notifications and decide how to best act based on the notifications, such as issuing warnings or evacuation orders.
Unfortunately, warnings and orders are not always effective. First, such warnings and evacuation orders are often issued for a large geographic locale, erring on the side of caution by being overly inclusive. If such over-inclusion happens often, residents may doubt the accuracy of such warnings and could even disobey evacuation orders in the orders in the belief that a false alarm exists. Further, such warnings may be incomplete. For example, a tsunami has multiple characteristics, such as wave height, inundation, spread, and arrival time. The degree to which the coastal region may be affected is topologically-specific and that level of specificity is normally omitted from the more populace-oriented warnings of general danger. This lack of specificity can be addressed with actionable location-centric data, yet the various agencies responsible for tsunami response remain focused on high level and conservative warning messages, in part due, to the overriding need to act promptly as well as lack of readily available reliable actionable data.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved way to provide notifications of a tsunami danger.